Baltimore, Babies & Big Monuments

Ok so the last one was a stretch, but the only “B-word” that was an appropriate description. Last Thursday night, Brian and I hit the road for Charlotte, NC. We stayed overnight at his parent’s house. After a long-awaited breakfast at Bob Evans with his mom [dad is in Hong Kong for business] - we hit the road again for Baltimore, MD.

 The trip to DC/Baltimore area – horrible. It was raining and storming the ENTIRE way and so combined total travel time was about 15 hours – yuck.  However, the trip home was beautiful – the fall color is in full swing and the entire trip was just gorgeous. I’m excited for fall to come south eventually – if we could just get some rain here in GA.

 We spent Friday night with Kelly, Mike and their beautiful daughter, Laura. Who is already now six months old. What a wonderful visit and as Brian wrote earlier - Charlene & Bill were there too – a wonderful, extra bonus to our visit.

Saturday was spent catching up with Kezia, Mike & Lexis [my oldest cousin - we're six months apart] my sister Sarah, David & of course [my most anticipated] my niece Elizabeth and my parents.  What a great time we had catching up, sharing stories and reminiscing about when we were little and our grandparents [who have unfortunately passed].

Sunday was an adventure for everyone – Mom & Sarah walked the Marine Marathon and successfully completed 1 hour and 57 seconds under their goal time. They had anticipated 8 hours [yes, 8 full hours of walking], but ended up with the finishing time of 6 hours, 59 minutes and 3 seconds!!  Sarah is a marathon pro – she’s even done a triathlon pregnant. However, this was a first for my mom and we were all SO PROUD of her!

Brian, Mike, Kezia, Lexis and I spent the rest of the afternoon walking around DC site-seeing and enjoying the beautiful fall day. The most memorable was the new WWII memorial. None of us had seen it before this visit.

 I’ll let Brian input some pictures of everything I mentioned. What a great weekend away! Makes it hard to come back to reality.

Capitol

Mileage

One of the few benefits of moving to Georgia from California has been dodging crazy wildfires.  That stuff is nuts! I don’t miss all the smoke and ash falling on our cars but watching the coverage on the news does make me miss southern California like crazy. I even got Leah to admit the other day that she misses Tustin in the fall. This was shocking to me since she has yet to admit she misses California like I do. But in “growing to love ATL” news – we watched a MTV special about the Hip-Hop scene in Atlanta. That made us a little excited to explore the city more and hopefully one day run into Lil Jon at the Majestic. YEAAAAAAAUUH!

Moving on…. Leah and I are headed to the Baltimore/DC area this weekend to visit with her sister Sarah and nearly everyone else who is related to the Pennington side the of the family. Should be a fun trip. We also get to see our friends from CA Kelly and Mike who moved to MD and had a kid since we last saw them. Craziness. Kelly’s parents, who totally rule, will also be visiting. Her dad works for Canon and always has the coolest camera gear. He’s totally gonna hate me for buying a Nikon. Shh…. don’t tell.

Cumming Fair

This past Friday night, Leah and I drove just a few miles down the the road to the annual Cumming Fair. We had been driving past it for weeks as they set it up and thought it would be fun to people watch and take in a funnel cake or three.  We never got around to eating any fried goodness but we did bring our “bag-o-cameras” and snapped a few cool photos. Check em out. (most photos are best viewed at full or very hi-resolution – so take the time to enlarge the image within Flickr)

In Rainbows

This is like the ‘DUH’ of the year but the new Radiohead is simply amazing. I literally can’t stop listening to it. I finish it, only to start it from the beginning again. You can get it for free if you want at inrainbows.com.

In other stuff – I uploaded a new batch of photos to our flickr site. Some were from the trip to Ohio for Grandpa’s funeral. Wasn’t really in the picture taking mood then but a few came out really well.

busy…ok. just busy.

Its Leah’s birthday today and sadly, we’ve both been to busy to really care. She says she doesn’t care and I think she may be telling the truth. (though it never hurts to email her and say ‘happy birthday.”) We have both been so busy lately that we barely can stop and smell the roses, or around here, dead grass.

I will tell you that our rockin’ gameday saturday was sort of a bust. Suffice it to say that we probably won’t be going to another Georga Tech game anytime soon. We discovered that the kind hillbilly rednecks you find in the south are way worse than the ones in the midwest. Oh..and I need someone to prove to me that all Clemson fans aren’t A-holes. I couldn’t find a “non A-hole” guy in orange anywhere this past Saturday. We ended up leaving at half time because it was so aggravating. This left us questioning our move to the south. The jury is still out on this one.

The rockin’ part of our weekend was good. For being really, really, really old, REO Speedwagon can still kick out the jams. I told Leah on the way into the show that I hoped REO didn’t just put out a new album because they are going to water down the set with crappy new songs instead of the old ones we all came to see. Sure enough a new record, that according to them, is their best work yet. I call baloney on that. They did a couple songs that everyone knew – people were singing along and dancing doing the white man’s overbite. Then they played a ‘new song off the new record” which bored people to death and caused the beer line to back up. Then they were back at the classics… only to do another new one. So… you see how this goes. All in all, not bad for free tickets.

Speaking of free tickets – I have tickets to see Cannibal Corpse and Goatwhore tomorrow night. I don’t think I’m going to exercise the FREE on those tickets. Though it would be cool to see them and REO on the same bill. Maybe in another 15 irrelevant years.